Business objects or other data objects in an object-oriented computer program can represent the entities in a business domain that the object-oriented computer program is designed to support. Business objects are also sometimes referred to as domain objects. A domain model can represent the set of domain objects and the relationships between them. A business object can encapsulate all or at least some of the data and business behavior associated with the entity that it represents. In some applications for example an enterprise resource application such as those available from SAP AG (Walldorf, Germany), a business object can be modeled and implemented in a normalized manner to optimize service provisioning. However, normalized business objects can be less convenient for certain consumer needs which can, in some examples, be more efficiently satisfied using denormalized views. For example, joined data of other business objects for use in a user interface, a form, an agent, a data analytic routine or module, or the like may be more efficiently accessed using one or more denormalized views. A service adaptation can provide a mapping facility to fill the gap between the provider layer, for example one or more repositories storing data and data objects, and a consumer layer that accesses the data and data objects.
Frontend service adaptation allows for the combination of fields from different business object nodes so that a resulting adapted business object node can be used for displaying required business data in a user interface. With frontend service adaptation, an adapted business object node is configured to contain fields from different business object nodes along an association path. Such an arrangement can result in a large amount of meta-data residing and being processed by a frontend server. In addition, during runtime, all data on an associated path is transferred to the frontend server. Moreover, many association paths may need to be evaluated on the frontend in order to access required business object fields. All of such requirements relating to frontend service adaptation can negatively affect performance, network data volume, memory consumption, and response time for the corresponding user interfaces.